Irregular Pronunciation Differences

Among the free personal pronouns, the third person singular pronoun “او” (meaning “he/she”) and the third person plural pronoun “آنها” are the only ones with a different colloquial form. They appear as “اون” and “اونا” respectively.

It was already mentioned that the pronoun “آن” is roughly equivalent to English “it” and is pronounced “اون” in spoken language according to the first general pronunciation shift rule. Therefore, the same pronoun (“اون”) is used for both humans and non-humans in colloquial Persian.

Recall that enclitic pronouns can denote possessors as well as objects. See how they are pronounced in colloquial language in the following examples.

Examples featuring nouns ending in a consonant:

Example featuring verbs:

Example featuring nouns ending in the vowel “ه”:

Examples featuring nouns ending in other vowels:

In Colloquial Persian, the object marker “را” normally appears as “و” (pronounced “o” and usually written attached to the noun preceding it when Colloquial Persian is written). When following a vowel, it becomes “رو” (pronounced “ro”).

The vowel “ه” at the end of a noun is pronounced “a” in Colloquial Persian when followed by the object marker.

The suffix “ها” is the main way of making nouns plural. It changes into “ا” in Colloquial Persian unless the noun ends in vowel “ه” or “ا”.

The consonant “ه” (“h”) at the beginning of the word “هم”, when meaning “too” or “even”, is not pronounced in Colloquial Persian. This difference in pronunciation, however, is not reflected in writing. When Colloquial Persian is written down, the letter “ه” at the beginning of “هم” is still usually written. The following examples are therefore useless unless you listen to them.

Prepositions and words similar to them that are usually accompanied by an “ezafe” are pronounced differently when their last sound is a vowel. In such cases, the ezafe is usually omitted.

The last example above features “توی” for the Formal Persian version, but note that this word is rarely used in formal language anyway. Instead, the word “در” is used. On the other hand, “در” is generally avoided in spoken language.